Animation
Give any object a clip: a named animation made of keyframes. Open a door, run a lift, spin a turntable, blink a light. Clips are stored with the object, replicate to everyone in the session, play on a shared clock, and export with your glTF.
Two different things called animation
This page is about animation you author — keys you place on a timeline. A model you import can also arrive with its own baked clips (a walk cycle from a rigged character); those play from the Animation section of the object's properties, and the Play Animation node drives either kind.
Opening the timeline
Select an object, then open the ＋ Animation tab — it sits with Flow and the UV editor in the bottom dock, and undocks into a floating window with the ⧉ button.
The window has three parts:
| Part | What it is |
|---|---|
| Clip list (left) | Every clip on the selected object. Add creates one; the ✎ renames; drag the divider to resize the list. |
| Timeline (centre) | The keys themselves — a dope sheet of channel rows, or a graph of curves. |
| Navigator (above the timeline) | The whole clip at a glance, with the visible window as a thumb — drag it to pan. |
Clips, channels and keys
A clip owns a length, a loop mode (once, loop or ping-pong) and any number of channels. A channel is one animatable property; Add channel lists the ones that apply to the object you picked:
| Group | Channels |
|---|---|
| Transform | pos.x/y/z, rot.x/y/z, scale (uniform) or scale.x/y/z |
| Visibility | visible — a stepped channel: it holds its value until the next key instead of fading |
| Look | opacity, color.r/g/b, metalness, roughness, Emission |
| Lights | light.intensity |
A key is a value at a time. Click a channel row at the playhead to add one; drag it to move it; Del removes the selection. Whatever you change — adding a channel, typing a value, retiming, moving a marker — the object re-poses straight away, so you see the result without touching the timeline.
Rotation turns around the object's origin
A door swings on its hinge only if its origin sits on the hinge. Set it from the object's properties (Transform ▸ Origin) before you key the rotation — the animation follows it.
Emission needs a colour
Emission is a strength multiplied by an emission colour, and a default material's is black — so turning the strength up alone would light nothing. The properties panel has one Emission block with both Strength and Colour; leave the colour alone and the object glows in its own.
Movements play from where the object is
A position channel is stored as an offset from its first key, not as an absolute place in the world. Move an object after animating it and the clip runs from its new home: a door authored at the origin opens wherever you later put it, and a lift you drag up one floor still travels the same distance from there.
Rotation, scale and the look channels are absolute — only position works this way, because it is the one people move.
This changed in 1.5.0
Clips saved before 1.5.0 are read the same way, so a movement authored in an older version now replays relative to the object's current position instead of snapping back to where it was keyed. For most scenes that is the behaviour you wanted. If a clip depended on returning to a fixed spot, re-key it where it belongs.
The transport
| Control | Does |
|---|---|
| ▶ / ⏸ | Play or pause on every peer |
| ◀ | Play backwards from the playhead — press it again to pause where you are |
| ⏹ | Stop and return to where playback started |
| ⏮ / ⏭ | Jump to the start / end of the clip |
| A / B | Set the loop start / end — playback stays inside that window while you work on one part |
| Speed | Playback rate. It changes nothing in the data |
| Fit | Frame the whole clip |
Timing: three separate things
These are deliberately not the same control, because collapsing them means giving a door more room silently makes it slower:
| You want | Use |
|---|---|
| The clip to be longer or shorter (keys stay where they are) | the clip length field |
| The movement itself stretched or squashed | Retime — scales every key time |
| It to play faster or slower, changing no data | the speed control |
Each clip also has its fps — what its key times mean, and the grid the arrow keys step on — and an optional step, which samples the clip on a coarser grid for a deliberately stepped, "on twos" look.
The dope sheet and the graph
Switch with the sheet / graph toggle:
- Dope sheet — one row per channel, keys as diamonds. Best for timing.
- Graph — the actual curves. Best for how a movement feels.
In the graph, each key carries the easing of the segment that follows it. Drag its tangent handles right on the curve, or type the numbers in the pad. Handles are allowed to overshoot past the value — that overshoot is what makes a bounce read as a bounce.
Selecting and editing keys
| Action | How |
|---|---|
| Select | Click a key; Shift+click adds |
| Box / lasso select | Drag on an empty part of the plot (the toolbar switches which) |
| Add the key under the playhead | Ctrl+Space |
| Drop the selection | Esc |
| Move / scale the selection | 1 / 2, then Shift+arrows (X = time, Y = value) |
| Grab with the pointer | Middle-click — the keys follow the cursor, click or Enter commits, Esc puts them back |
| Copy / paste / duplicate | Ctrl+C / V / D |
| Mirror in time | M |
| Delete | Del |
The clipboard is held by channel and relative to the earliest key copied, so a paste works across clips and across objects, creating any channel the target is missing.
Navigating
| Action | How |
|---|---|
| Step the playhead by a frame | ← / → (Ctrl ×10, Shift ×100) |
| Jump key to key | Alt+← / → |
| Zoom | Wheel (up = in), or the ± buttons |
| Pan | Right- or middle-drag, Shift+wheel, or the navigator thumb |
Auto-key
Switch Auto-key on and posing the object records it: drag the gizmo or type a number in the properties panel and a key lands at the playhead, creating the channel if it does not exist yet. Switch it off and the object goes back to being just an object.
Material edits count as posing. Pick a colour, drag Roughness or Metalness, change Emission — the key lands as you make the change, so you can work entirely in the properties panel and watch the channels appear.
If Auto-key is on and the object has no clips at all, the first change you make creates one and tells you it did.
Presets
Door, Drawer, Elevator, Turntable, Pulse and Blink out drop a finished clip onto the selected object — a starting point you then retime and re-ease. Door and Drawer expect a sensible origin (see the tip above).
Markers
Name a moment inside a clip — "footstep", "latch", "dust" — and the Animation Marker node fires as the playhead crosses it, on every peer. Add one at the playhead from the marker row; double-click to rename; ✕ removes it.
Markers ride with the clip, so they save, replicate and undo with it.
Onion skin
Switch Onion skin on to see faint ghosts of the object at the keys either side of the playhead — the classic way to judge spacing. It is a local view setting: your peers do not see your ghosts. A ghost that would land exactly on the object hides itself, so a clip driving only colour or opacity does not read as a second solid copy.
Everyone sees the same thing
Both halves replicate. The data (clips, keys, markers) syncs latest-wins, and the transport (which clip is playing, from when, at what speed, inside which A/B window) rides the session's synced clock, so every peer evaluates the same pose at the same moment. Someone joining late receives all of it.
Every gesture is one undo step — a drag of twelve keys undoes as one, not twelve.
Driving clips from the flow graph
| Node | Does |
|---|---|
| Play Animation | Play, stop, restart or toggle a clip — wire On Click to it and a door opens for everyone who sees it clicked |
| Animation Finished | Pulses when a once clip reaches its end — hand off to a sound, a counter, or the next door |
| Animation Marker | Pulses as a named marker passes |
| Animation State | Reads progress, playing, position, duration or remaining as a number |
Saving and export
Clips are part of the object, so they travel in your .tpscene files and autosaves. Saving a glTF samples every clip into real keyframe tracks, so other tools play them back — with one exception: the look channels (opacity, colour, metalness, roughness, glow, light intensity) are not part of what glTF animation can carry, so they stay in the app.